Youth voters must unite to protect future generations from gun violence

An important echo opinion written by Jennifer Rubin published in The Washington Post: 

Youth driven anti-gun violence protests against school shootings will energize young voters!

Tennessee Republican state representatives’ outlandish recent expulsion of two Black Democratic lawmakers brought shame on the GOP and on a state with a dismal history of voter repression. 

But the attempt to silence the lawmakers, for leading a youth-driven gun protest at the Capitol following the March 27 Nashville school slaughter, might also have accelerated two key developments: (1) awareness that social change is inextricably linked to democracy’s defense, and (2) engagement of young voters, who have lately been showing their muscle.

Although Democrats quickly reappointed the ousted lawmakers, the Tennessee travesty is a reminder that a largely White Republican Party increasingly resorts to antidemocratic means to squelch Black voting power and maintain policies (on guns, abortion, LGBTQ rights) that most voters reject. As Democracy Docket’s Caroline Sullivan and Madeleine Greenberg point out, the expulsion was not an isolated event in Tennessee, but rather part of a widespread attack on democracy that includes 470,000 people affected by felony disenfranchisement, egregious gerrymandering and barriers to mail-in voting.

If their representatives cannot be heard, voters will find that their interests — on matters such as gun safety, education and health care — can be quashed. The effort to muzzle the majority reflects the MAGA movement’s heightened panic.

“Tired from choosing to defend the indefensible, enraged at being called out, Trump’s supporters lash out,” evangelical Christian and conservative writer Peter Wehner wrote in an Atlantic article headlined “An Acute Attack of Trumpism in Tennessee.”  (IMO Maine Writer says this "acute attack" should become a chronic condition! Trumpziism = Fascism.)

In this case, the entire country witnessed a temper tantrum that tried to block progress on guns by quashing free speech and representative democracy.

This is a party frantic to hold back the tide of social change. As long as a narrow subsection of mostly White officials can gerrymander districts, erect obstacles to voting and appoint partisan ideologues to the bench (as well as maintain antidemocratic mechanisms such as the Senate filibuster), social change might be impossible. Voters and their representatives cannot address gun safety (favored by an overwhelming majority of Americans) or preserve abortion rights (favored by a 2-1 majority) unless democratic values are secured and fortified.

While Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and four other Senate Democrats, alarmed by the Tennessee Republicans’ punitive move, plead with Attorney General Merrick Garland to use “all available legal authorities to investigate the expulsions,” activists for issues such as gun safety, abortion rights and LGBTQ rights must connect the dots: (Trumpziism!) MAGA forces’ attack on democracy poses the greatest barrier to obtaining progressive policy goals. The public is with them on guns, abortion rights and LGBTQ rights; but proponents might never achieve their aims so long as reactionary Republicans block the will of the people. The return to office by the expelled Democrats known as the Tennessee Two might help Americans appreciate that racial and social change depend on a strengthened democracy.

Lighting a fire under young voters

The temporarily ousted Tennessee state representatives, Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, both under 30, had stood shoulder to shoulder with students who poured out of Nashville schools protesting inaction on gun safety. They garnered national attention at a time younger voters are drawing attention as a decisive voting bloc. Republicans are noticing.

In Wisconsin, a Republican former governor, Scott Walker, viewing the results of Democrats’ recent win in the state Supreme Court election, declared on Twitter, “Younger voters are the issue.” Although he bizarrely blamed “radical indoctrination,” Walker’s conclusion was sound: “We have to counter it or conservatives will never win battleground states again.”

In a similar vein, GOP pollster and strategist Kellyanne Conway said on Fox News that Republicans have “got work to do on the young people who think differently on abortion, perhaps, or guns or climate change.” She’s worried that Democrats can create a “turnout machine with young people.”

These Republicans understand that young voters, as in the 1960s, and 1970s, can play a critical role in igniting social change and dislodging right-wing powerholders.

Youth voters united!  VOTE for change!

Current data debunks the conventional wisdom that younger Americans don’t vote (and therefore can be ignored). Young voters turned out where it mattered most in 2022, namely in swing states with competitive races. The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tuft University’s post-2022, election study found that youth turnout in Colorado, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon and Pennsylvania exceeded 32 percent. Atrocious turnout rates below 20 percent in states such as Alabama, Indiana, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and West Virginia dragged down the national youth turnout rate.

The significance of the youth vote shouldn’t be underestimated. “If the elections had been decided by voters 45 and older, Republicans would have won the House by an even greater margin and likely taken the Senate,” polling analyst John Della Volpe wrote in the New York Times after the election.

The implications for 2024 are eye-opening, according to Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic pollster who pre-bunked the 2022 red wave. “Projecting forward,” he writes on Substack, “keeping the 2020, vote constant, but now [adjusting] upward for the growth of [Gen Z and Millennial] generations into the electorate,” he found, these two segments could rise to 37 percent of all voters. 😃😃

Therefore, the result would be a national margin for Democrats of 6 percent.

If youth activism and Democratic Party outreach to younger voters increase in the run-up to 2024, the two young Tennessee lawmakers will deserve plenty of credit. Indeed, that pair and the students they championed might one day be regarded in a light similar to that of the 1963 Children’s Crusade, when hundreds of young people — braving attack dogs and fire hoses turned on them by racist official Bull Connor in Birmingham, Ala. — alerted the nation that democracy needs foot soldiers.